It’s almost time for August. And this little blog space has been in the corners of my mind for months. I used to write much more frequently and have since built up quite a bit of hesitation before every blog post I attempt. I have conflicting thoughts in my head over what I want is space to be, especially with some changes coming up in my life… But while I’m pondering these things. My poor little Conversations blog sits dormant.

Back in August 2010 I decided to give myself a break from writing blog posts and instead shared a photo or two each day as a way to be present in my days without the pressure of finding words. I blogged about it (of course), invited everyone to join me and lo, The August Break was born.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I enrolled in the Institute of Integrative Nutrition this year, and am almost ten weeks into the program. It’s been incredibly interesting and really fun work to be doing. There’s this workbook that we have that is more focused on the business aspect of the schooling, and we’ve been chugging slowly through that the past couple weeks. The beginning is very much about intention setting and sussing out your goals for the the school year(s) and your application of what you’ve learned (including any business you want to grow out of it). I love this kind of stuff. This might be a surprise to some of my friends… but I’m a huge internal planner. Goals, lists, check-ins… I do this multiple times a year. So the first couple chapters of this workbook have been fun. An extension of some of the things I already do.
Then I hit this one question, after a string of school and work focused questions.

“What is your life purpose?”

And I froze.
Actually, quite literally, paused. Pen suspended above the workbook, staring at the question.
Absolutely empty-headed and awash in a sea of blank space.
Completely stumped!

Let me repeat… I think about this type of stuff A LOT. It’s a constant record in my head… How do I want my days to go, to look, to feel… How do I want/need to be spending my time, where do I want my energy to go, what are my priorities. I can tell you lists of goals, things I want to do, experience, accomplish. In the next couple months, this year, over the next two years, the next five… I have goals that I know will resurface twenty years from now.

But my life purpose?! That’s a question outside of goals and plans. An intention stripped down. A purpose that would be yours whether you were a massage therapist or a social worker or a stay at home mom or a business owner. Whether you were married or not, had three kids or none. Whether you lived in New York or in Modesto. And I think it’s been a really long time since I’ve even thought to consider a question like that.

So I’m here… still letting the question marinate… but hoping that some friends can give some little shout outs, and help me out as I mull this over.

Do you know what your life purpose is? Have you thought about it? Are you willing to share?

After the reinvention of Red’s coffee shop in Santa Barbara’s funk zone, Goleta Coffee Company has been my favorite coffee shop. I don’t come too often, because there are so many more that are closer to where I live. But I really just love this place, feel instantly at ease, cozy, and energized by all the visual eccentricities. I adore places like this. A little industrial, a little mismatched and haphazard, and if you can’t have an outdoor patio, then yes please to the fireplace surrounded by booths and a couch. Some of the furniture is quite hideous, and there’s a crazy red paisley rug on the concrete floor under the sofa, but these things make me want to camp out for hours all the same. I’m really here to do some IIN coursework, which I’m excited to get started (who ever predicted I would say that about school!), but I was listening to one of Jen Lee’s Retrospective podcasts, (where she has conversations with so many different people with different backgrounds and different kinds of work about how they got where they are, stories from their life and what drives, inspires and provokes thought in them.) on the way over here. She interviewed a novelist, Diana Spechler in the one I listened to this morning, and I was so captivated by this conversation. It just sparked so many thoughts in me.. Those kinds of mind-boggling, open-ended, questioning thoughts about why the society is in the state and shape that it is, and how achingly delicate and impressionable the human mind can be, and how long we can hold on to healable wounds that we try not to realize are there. It made me think about how so many people are in such desperate need for connection, whether they realize it or not. And how overwhelming that need seems sometimes, and by that I mean the need in the world. How great the need is for mentors. The need for, not even service and resources and organizing committees, but for one individual to sit with another individual and be able to hold a space of patience and honesty and unconditional love. For a conversation.
I guess, for me anyways, it always comes back to conversation. So much can be healed through conversation with another. Through entering into a real conversation with yourself about how you’re making your home in the world and what is or isn’t nourishing you. A conversation with the scarier parts of the secret wishes and judgments that we try to keep locked inside ourselves so that the world stays properly balanced on our own self determined axis.
And I don’t think the power even lies in finding the answer. I think back to how many friends and former homeless shelter clients, and even fictional characters (which you know were based on real emotions) have said, if only I knew why I do this! Why do I have this pattern, this reflex, why do I keep myself here, why do I do this to myself… if I only knew why, maybe I could do something about it. It sounds almost like just another mind trick to keep yourself stationary, doesn’t it? Safe in the obvious truth that until you figure out the answer… there’s nothing that can possibly be done differently.
I think fixating on the answer is a stalling technique. And I think the real power lies in the conversation. In the attempt to understand. In the willingness to hold a dialogue with yourself or someone else, or in prayer or in meditation, and to ask the difficult questions, “the questions that have no right to go away” (David Whyte). To always try to have that courageous conversation. It opens up those dark and messy places, it brings them into the light, little by little, until they don’t feel so taboo anymore. Until the twisted and aching, the hidden and seemingly shameful are finally recognized as passing, malleable, and so unavoidably human and common and cyclical. I don’t know how it happened, that unpleasant feelings became so unmentionable. Like excitement and enthusiasm and affection and satisfaction are the most acceptably universal feelings. But shame… loneliness, and despair and numbness and uncertainty and even sometimes desire… struggle… how did those feelings get exiled? To the land of no-that-never-happens-to-me or don’t-you-mention-that-out-loud-because-it-might-make-people-uncomfortable… to see or talk about an emotion that has a story attached to it. Its all just so stupidly common. From drug addictions, to body image and disordered eating, to the aftermath of feeling abandoned by a parent to the regular old longing for things to be shaken up a little.

How the mind reels.
I may have ended up in a very different place than the podcast started me out with. But isn’t that just how thoughts are. They tip and they pour into other thoughts, which tumbled out in various directions and trip over personal histories and experiences before being sifted into new or rehashed notions.
And I just had to get that all out onto a page, even a virtual one, so that I can focus on learning dietary theories and planning out my February.